Twig

by wildbow

  I held it over the trolley, removed the pin, and squeezed out the contents, while holding eye contact with Lillian.

  One yellow pill.

  “The leash.”

  “Mm hmm,” Lillian said.

  I broke eye contact, stepping away.

  “I’d like your permission to check your hands,” I said.

  “My hands?”

  “Gut feeling,” I said.

  “What if I don’t give it, hm?”

  “I’ll figure it out,” I told her. “But this will go a lot smoother if you just say yes. I’ll only touch your hands, for now.”

  “Go ahead,” she said.

  I caught the thumb of her left hand between the index and middle fingers of one of my hands, and used my other hand to trap the four fingers, holding them together, lined up in a row.

  I checked the thumb first, running my fingers along the length of it, firmly, until I reached the pad. I squeezed the pad, applying pressure as if I were milking a cow.

  The needle slid out from beneath the thumbnail, beading with a droplet of something.

  “Yeah,” I said. I shifted my grip around, then checked her fingers.

  Index, middle, and pinky fingers of her left hand all had weapons within.

  “Why not this finger?” I asked, touching the other.

  “Sentiment,” Lillian said.

  “Fray did this, once upon a time. I thought about you being inspired by that. Somehow, when I imagined you preparing to beat me, this was always just something I assumed.”

  Which wasn’t entirely true, if I admitted it to myself. But something had prompted me to check as Jamie and I had been binding her hands. I’d cheated before conducting this little exercise.

  I left her behind, crossing the room to look for one of the canvas pouches that had tools or nails in them. The inside of the first of the two bags I found was filthy, so I made a point of turning it inside out before sliding it over Lillian’s hand, a kind of protective mitten. The fine syringe needles likely wouldn’t pierce the canvas, and with the canvas snug and bound in place, her hands would be more or less stuck balled into fists. Even if she were able to pierce the canvas, she wouldn’t be able to stick me or Jamie with the needles.

  I returned to my position, just in front of her, smiling.

  “What now?” she asked.

  I reached up, and with ginger care, I took hold of the half circle of her hairband, and lifted it off of her head. I ran my fingers along it.

  “Just a hairband, Sy,” Lillian said. I could feel her breath. Even without the hairband, it was warm enough that her sweat-damp hair was staying where it was

  I set it down on the trolley.

  I reached up to her ear, and the exercise of removing the earrings was delicate enough that I had to look away, working to remove the pearl studs without touching her ear.

  “Just earrings, Sy,” she said, as I removed the first.

  I worked on the second, and had enough of a sense of how to remove it that I didn’t need to look for the full duration of it.

  I could see the fine hairs on her neck standing on end.

  I held both earrings with one hand, pearls with tiny spears of metal sticking out of them. With the spears pinched in between finger and thumb, I used the back of my hand to move her glass, and put the pearls into the ring of condensation that the underside had left. I stirred them in that shallow puddle, leaving white trails.

  “Just earrings,” I said, as they gradually dissolved.

  “Also serviceable as a mild drug, mixed into water,” Lillian said.

  “Mary did more than lend you a pair of shoes and give you some instruction in hand to hand,” I said.

  “We spent a lot of time together over the past few months,” Lillian said.

  “The earrings were cute,” I said. “It would be nice if you wore stuff like that more. But they weren’t very you.”

  “I thought you’d be flattered, thinking they were for your benefit, and that you’d overlook them.”

  I shook my head.

  “Darn,” she said, without any pathos.

  “I’d like to check your hair,” I said. “With your permission.”

  “You’ll figure out something if I say no, will you?”

  “Probably.”

  She leaned forward, staring down at my feet, offering me her head.

  I ran my fingers through her hair, combing it with my fingernails. I did two passes to be sure, then a third to comb it into her usual style, parted to one side, tucked behind her ears. After a moment’s consideration, I replaced the hairband.

  I upended a share of her glass of water into my cupped hand, leaving it only a quarter full. Then I picked out one of the pills.

  “Sterilization, if I remember right?” I asked.

  “Yes, but… what are you doing?”

  I didn’t answer right away. I dropped the pill into the water, then rubbed my hands together. The pill dissolved into the water, and I thoroughly washed my hands like that.

  I dried them on my clean handkerchief.

  “You could be more sterile than that,” Lillian observed. “What are you doing?”

  “Mouth,” I said.

  “Mouth?” she asked, raising her eyebrows.

  “Don’t look so surprised. If you’ll allow me, I’m going to check the inside of your mouth.”

  She didn’t protest or argue, but opened her mouth.

  The spectre gnashed her teeth at me, playful.

  I drew my knife, and held it in one hand, so the blade lay against my wrist, the handle extending forward. Lillian pulled her head back as I extended it toward her mouth.

  “To keep you from biting,” I said. “Like you said, you’re still angry, right?”

  Lillian relented. I placed the handle of the knife between her molars on the one side, and ran my fingers along either side of her top and bottom teeth, then checked the wells between her cheeks and gums. I switched sides, worked my way all the way back—

  And felt something solid.

  There was a catch, a fine, tiny lever, of the sort that might be tripped with the tongue.

  False tooth. I undid the catch, removed the tooth, and then removed the catch.

  I set it all down on the table, removing the knife from her mouth.

  “Son of a bitch,” Lillian said, as she looked down at it.

  “Yeah, I know,” I said. I wiped the saliva from my fingers on my shirt-front, drawing an ‘x’ as I did it.

  Spectre Lillian smiled. The real Lillian pretended not to notice.

  I struck the false tooth with the blunt end of the knife. It disintegrated. I used the blade to nudge the individual pieces away from the tiny yellow pill that was nestled within.

  “Two little yellow pills,” I said.

  “Fancy that,” Lillian said.

  “Guess you’re staying with me a little while longer,” I said.

  She nodded, her expression unreadable.

  The spectre, however, gave me a faltering smile.

  “Was the plan to pop the tooth free, crack it between your teeth, and spit the yellow pill into my food or something?” I asked.

  “Maybe,” Lillian said.

  “How did I do? Did I get all of it?”

  “Do you seriously expect me to answer that?” Lillian asked.

  “I’ll give you a choice,” I said.

  “Another choice,” she said.

  “You tell me what you hid, and I’ll remove it, or you do a very good job of sincerely telling me that you don’t have anything more, that I won, and I take you at your word…”

  “You trailed off there. What’s option three?”

  “Option three is that you leave me no choice, I can’t take you at your word, and I have to assume you hid something in your undergarments, like Mary typically does.”

  I saw her freeze a little with that.

  “I did,” she said.

  It was my turn to mentally stumble over her words. A part of me ex
pected her to claim it was a joke.

  “In my bra. A paper packet of poison,” she said, raising her chin a little.

  A challenge. Testing my limits as a gentleman. Did she think it was her victory in more than one way? That she’d hidden it successfully, and that she was going to make me balk?

  The me she’d known might have, the Sylvester who had slept in her bed and taken her to dinner with her parents.

  I stepped closer, one of my hands going to her top button, and I could see her shocked reaction.

  “I guess you win,” I murmured in her ear, undoing the one button.

  I started on the second. I was very aware of her breathing, or the lack thereof. She was very still.

  “You can ask for Jamie at any time,” I reminded her, as I undid the second button.

  “No need,” she said, in the smallest, tightest of voices. The flush was full now.

  Did she think this was a game of chicken? That if she held firm, I would back off?

  I reached inside her shirt, and I didn’t touch skin. Wyvern coupled with weeks and months of training my hands with lockpicking and medical care and tool use and whiling away my time with playing with needles and coins and blades had left me with a great deal of confidence in my fingers and my sense of touch.

  I didn’t touch skin, but I felt the fine beads of sweat that had collected on it, the fine, nearly-invisible white hairs that stood out from the skin, no doubt bristling from the goosebumps on the skin’s surface itself. I felt the body heat, and judged my fingers’ distance from Lillian’s breast, as I moved my hand at a snail’s pace.

  I had disarmed landmines with less care than I moved my hand over that tantalizing surface. I operated with touch alone, my eyes fixed on Lillian’s.

  My fingernail touched the strap of her bra, and I traced the nail along the strap’s edge, down to the bra itself, then along the edge. It vibrated slightly and silently as the fingernail’s edge dragged along the stitching, the very edge of my finger touching the beads of sweat and fine hairs.

  “Damn,” I murmured, into Lillian’s ear. “I hoped there would be a little tag of paper sticking out I could grab.”

  “Damn,” Lillian said, her voice even softer and tighter than before. She was staring at my eyes, but in that moment, she was really staring well past me. Her focus wasn’t on sight.

  “I beg your pardon,” I said, reaching behind her with my other hand. “With utmost sincerity.”

  With one hand and a snapping motion of my fingers, I undid the clasp on her bra. She jumped as if she’d been stabbed, and her focus returned to me, her eyes on mine.

  I moved my fingers down, tracing more fine hairs and more waves of warm body heat, then crossed the void to the concave of the now loose bra cup. With two fingers, I retrieved my prize, and maneuvered my hand out of her shirt.

  I held up my prize between our faces, then flicked it through the air, letting it land on the trolley. In the moment it smacked into place, the spell was broken, and she let out the breath she’d been holding in, shivering visibly as she did it.

  Not a bad sort of shiver, either.

  “If you cut me free from this post, I would pounce on you in an instant,” the spectre said. “And get payback for all of the teasing you just put me through.”

  Payback in the form of a beating, or in the form of making me follow through on every tease?

  The spectre smiled.

  “Can you imagine?” I asked Lillian. “Next time, I’m going to have to assume you’ll be better with the hiding places. I’ll have to be even more thorough.”

  “What? Next time?”

  “I like you, Lillian,” I said. “This isn’t the last time I’ll say hi. I’ll nab you again, the next time the Lambs show. We’ll have another conversation. I’ll frisk you again, again, if you don’t want Jamie to handle it.”

  “I don’t think it works that way, Sylvester,” Lillian said.

  I’d let that ‘Sylvester’ slide.

  “Naturally, you’ll do your best to work with the Lambs to counteract it, but that’s what makes it so interesting a challenge, do you see?”

  “I don’t see at all,” Lillian said.

  “I’ll kidnap you again, and then again. And maybe kidnap Mary once just to say hi and make you a little jealous, even though she would scare me, if she were tied to a post in front of me.”

  “Sy, no.”

  “The Lambs are important to me,” I said. “I want them in my life in some capacity or another. And this week has been fantastic fun. If this is the only capacity I can have you, then I’ll be damned if I’m not going to kidnap you at every opportunity.”

  “It doesn’t work that way, Sy.”

  “Then how does it work, Lillian?” I asked. I stepped back, perching on the stool. “Because the way I see it, this is utterly guiltless, for you. You’re at my mercy. If pressed, you can say you were innocent. I got the upper hand. You can even tell yourself that, if that makes it easier. But I know you’ve enjoyed yourself in some capacity.”

  Her eyes were fixed on the floor. She responded to that last point with a faint nod, as if she wasn’t even aware she was doing it.

  “So you—” I started, as she said, “You’ve—”

  In the moment that followed, I quietly said, “Your turn.”

  She did that faint nod again.

  “You’ve ruined me, Sy.”

  “Hm?”

  “You’ve ruined me,” she said.

  “Naw,” I replied.

  She spoke, still staring at the floor, as if she wasn’t talking to me any more. “Did you know I got a boyfriend?”

  I blinked.

  “I had two, as a matter of fact.”

  “Not Duncan,” I said.

  Lillian raised her head, giving me an incredulous look, “No!”

  “Oh, good,” I said.

  “He’s a year above me, working on his gray coat. Tall, smart, well put together, a little bit athletic. All of the girls in his year go weak in the knees over him when he walks down the hall. He and I struck up a conversation, and he asked me out. Me and… actually, I won’t name him. You might hunt him down.”

  I might. That ‘tall’ comment was a barb. Even now I was only Lillian’s height.

  “We dated. I was trying to fill a void, and I used him to do it, I admit it. So many of those girls would kill me if I said it like that. I, he and I, we messed around. Kissed.”

  If she was trying to make me jealous, it was working.

  “It didn’t—it wasn’t the same. The kisses were… nice enough, for kisses. But they weren’t like the ones you gave me. It was the same for spending time with him. You were always so attentive, you paid attention to every little thing, catalogued everything you could use and you used it and… you made me feel cherished. You make me feel like that here, while I’m tied to this dang post.”

  Her bagged hands pulled at the restraints. Her frustration seemed to flow out into the gesture. Her hands shook a little as she stopped pulling, as if she was clenching each fist in the bag.

  “You were my first love,” she said. “I will never… never have someone who pays close attention to me like you did. Never someone as sharp as you, never someone who kisses like you did. I’m ruined, don’t you see? Romance is ruined for me, because everything that waits for me pales, compared to this.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “I wanted to feel something like I felt with you. He and I went further. I let him put his hand up my shirt, this boy I didn’t even like, in the end. Because I wanted to feel like I did when you kiss me. That’s… that’s how ruined I am, don’t you see?”

  “I don’t think you’re ruined at all,” I said. “Not because of that.”

  “And I’m supposed to be happy with this?” she asked. There was a note of anger in her voice. “With being kidnapped over and over? Waiting months for, what, one or two days?”

  “You’re not supposed to do anything,” I said. “Sorry. It was a
good solution when I put it together in my head. If you want something else, then… let me know what it is. I’m adaptable.”

  “My choice?” Lillian asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Would you kiss me, please?”

  I wasted no time in stepping away from the stool, putting one hand on the side of her face, and kissing her like I’d been aching to do since I’d first carried her off.

  I gave her light, teasing kisses, drawing her forward, retreating, tormenting her, making her ask.

  Her lips still touched mine, moved against mine, as she murmured, “Real kisses.”

  Real kisses.

  I gave her what she wanted. No butterfly-light brushes of lip against lip, but full contact, forceful enough to press her head back against the post. She pushed her body against mine, pulled her arms forward against the restraints, as if she’d forgotten I’d tied them in the moment.

  I was aware of the spectre, and allowed one of my eyes to watch her as she snapped her jaw shut.

  My hands went to Lillian’s throat, fingers touching the corners of her jaw. She moaned lightly into my mouth, and then I felt the tension at the corner of her jaw, as she opened it.

  I pulled back. The skin of my teeth wasn’t quite apropos, because it was her teeth, as she moved to bite me, hard.

  Her head dropped. My hands were still on her neck and face, and I could feel her shaking.

  “What was that about?” I asked.

  She didn’t respond.

  “Okay,” I said. “If you want, we can—”

  “Don’t,” she said, without raising her head.

  It was a fierce enough utterance that my hands dropped away from her neck and face.

  She was crying, now. I could see the first tear. The angle of her head and her hair made it hard to see anything else.

  “Please don’t,” I said. “Don’t cry. This was all pretty nice.”

  She nodded, as if in agreement, then said, “I can’t.”

  “Please,” I said. “Whatever I can do, just—”

  “Don’t!” she said, raising her voice, suddenly tense.

  I stopped, helpless.

  “Stop… stop giving me choices,” she said.

  I opened my mouth to speak, and I had no idea what to say.

  “Stop. Just stop,” she said. “I can’t do this.”

  The words didn’t come to my lips. I backed away. It was like night and day, this and before.